


a war story is a black space (or: body horror)

by eldritchbee



Series: Goretober 2020 [11]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Animal Death, Bugs & Insects, F/M, Gen, Goretober, Goretober 2020, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-10-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:14:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27169157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eldritchbee/pseuds/eldritchbee
Summary: You’re not the only one who defined herself by battle. By the guts she’s spilled, by ten thousand yeerks dropped into empty space, by the constant constant internal battle of killing a family member. By the blood she tasted and the bones she broke and the role forced upon her and the loss, the constant reminder of loss. Crayak knocks on the dark matter that holds her, and a thousand fires and a thousand wars and a thousand evils explode outside their contained space.---Post-war special. The kids struggle to stop seeing their bodies as weapons.For Goretober 2020 (prompt #19 - body horror, or the horror of having a body)
Relationships: Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill & Jake Berenson & Cassie & Marco & Rachel & Tobias, Eva & Marco (Animorphs), Rachel (Animorphs)/Tobias (Animorphs)
Series: Goretober 2020 [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1950091
Comments: 4
Kudos: 20





	a war story is a black space (or: body horror)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Catherynne M. Valente's Deathless:
> 
> "I will not let her speak because I love her, and when you love someone, you do not make them tell war stories. A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead."

* * *

_**Jake** _ traces the blue veins of his arms, down and down to his wrist. There are things that you can’t see anymore, hurts that don’t appear. 

Did it really happen?

He has nightmares, sometimes, of the worst things. All those times where limbs have been torn off, bodies have been smashed, poison has been inhaled - only this time, he’s human.

His second morph, losing his tail. His guts strewn on the side of an airplane wall, when he was dying, dying, dying and all that kept him alive were _their_ voices. What would the scar of a fly swatter look like? What would it look like on a carapace body should, somehow, their soft inner selves remained inside. What would it look like close up? Zoomed in? What about his fight with a lion - a traitor who’s fate he cares nothing for? Did it really happen? The bite of a lion should leave more than enough of a mark, even on that of a tiger. 

What would that look like on a human body?

His body was supposed to be a place where war took place, but he holds no memento. The rewards and accolades are nothing to him, the names feel like mockery and taste like ash. He’s a pretender, a fake, worse than a Yeerk.

Even if he carves _Rachel_ and _Tom_ and _James_ and _ten thousand Yeerks_ onto his body over and over, one morph will wash it away.

_**Marco** _ plays pretend. The beautiful, gilded people around him lean in and listen and laugh as he tells a story. “Okay, let me tell you _this_ one. I almost got caught between morphs. I would have looked like some half wolf half human _freak_ , you wouldn’t _believe_ it.” And they’d laugh, and they’d laugh, and Marco would laugh and pretend that _they’re only stories_ . He wants to bleach out the memories, make those moments less horrible. He was thirteen once and his body was frozen with a snout and human fingers on wolf’s paws and his elbows seemingly broken backwards and he thought that would be the rest of his life. "Try to beat _that_ one, werewolves."

He was thirteen once, and he’d had his body bitten in half at the waist. “Let me tell you guys about _ants_ , okay? Ants are _not_ to be fucked with.” He rubs his stomach while he laughs, like making sure he’s still all there, together. “Let me tell you what’s gonna make your kid wanna learn to swim _really_ fast.”

They don’t realize it, the way he scrubs his body in the shower so hard it hurts. To wash it all off, to throw it away. His body was supposed to be a place where war took place, and every waking hour, every second, every step and every breath burns somewhere where he could tell a story. But, no matter how many times he writes it down, carves it out, the memento, the memories remain.

His mother is the only one who looks at him with sad, tired eyes when he tells a story. 

She’s the only one who wipes the fake smile from his face and holds his hand. 

“Remember when I almost killed you, mom?”

“I was really proud of you. I still am.”

**Cassie** wakes up screaming. 

Sometimes her senses go haywire. She tastes blood where she shouldn’t, feels the texture of Hork Bajir scale in between her teeth, feels the betrayed termite queen between her pincers and bites down _hard_. She’s dating someone new now, and he’ll never be able to understand what it felt like to rip someone’s throat right out. He’ll never know the right words to say when she gets like this. She doesn’t ask him to.

Her therapist doesn’t know either, never will. Still, she talks about it, to avoid the moment when her teeth clench shut and she feels bone crack underneath. “I was a T-rex once, I almost killed my friends, I still think of the termite queen. I think about her once a day.”

War took place on her very tongue, and there was a battle every time she opened her mouth - whether to bite down or to condemn another person like her to the life of prey. No one else will understand the reason why she wraps herself in a cocoon of blankets, why she envies the world where she became the butterfly and flew away from her war and the rest of the world.

She went vegetarian a long time ago, but she’ll always feel closer to the carnivores.

Those sharp teeth, the vicious way they chase their pray, the easy way they bite down and kill. The carcasses, hollow bellies of prey being shared by a pride. Cats and foxes playing with mice. Insects. The brutal, cruel, simple world of eat or be eaten -

she rewinds those old Nat Geo videos again and again. When her boyfriend asks _why_ she says, “because they don’t feel bad when they do it. 

I wish I were them.”

**Ax** understands so suddenly what it must have been like to be Elfangor. He always wanted so badly to be like his brother, and here it was. Living among humans for years, when he steps onto an andalite ship for the first time he immediately wants to turn around. The questions they ask make him uncomfortable, their condescension of humanity and yeerk and hork bajir makes him sick, and he wants to yell _well where were you?_ when he was slicing through taxxon, when he felt the soft buzzing of a saw pushing into his skull, when Cassie pulled away pieces of his brain matter only for him to realize she’d let a yeerk into his mind. 

_Where were you?_ _Would you listen to me? Would you even understand?_

Still, he lets them reward him with title. After years on earth, the only thing about him that felt _andalite_ was war. He picks up the title of _Prince_ , thinking of how Elfangor took it and used it to force the andalites to return to his other home. Thinking of how Jake dropped it, carelessly and retreated from all of them. The last thing Jake said before he’d left was 

_Ax. Is it really over? Did it even happen at all?_

It has to. Or else, who is he?

When he leaves earth, he feels like he’s leaving everything else behind

his only friends, his nephew and _shorm_ , delicious food cinnamon buns and television, the feeling of paper books under his fingertips, Marco’s jokes, the scoop that he spent three years considering _inferior_ , earthen grass, earthen water, the rainbow of species that swallowed each other whole in the form of a billion chains of life. Things Aldrea told him, things Arbron told him, what he could infer of Elfangor all belonged to the _aristh_ Aximili.

His body was a place where war took place. And war is the only thing left of him when he leaves Earth. 

**Tobias** decides he is no longer human. 

His mind, his humanity, is a place where war took place. To live in human skin - to live in _his_ \- is to live in a constant state of war. So he sheds it like old feathers, let’s himself go so deep into the hawk’s mind that he thinks not even Taylor could effectively torture him anymore. He hides away from _her_ last words and _her_ body, head smashed in and body looking like a broken doll on the side of the ship. He needs to forget, needs to forget, needs to forget.

Ax invites him to the andalite homeworld.

Loren offers her home, a chance for them to be a normal family.

Jake tries to apologize.

Marco tries so hard to be casual.

Cassie was the only other person who _loved_ her as strongly as he. But, even she could never change his mind.

“Red-tailed hawks only live for twenty-five years at the most, Tobias. And we don’t know how old your current form was before being acquired.” 

Fine. 

His body was a place where war took place. Where he condemned the very dinosaurs and aliens that lived with them, where he found his father, found his mother, where he felt taxxon hunger and felt Taylor’s nails dig into his wing, David would break his wings and he would follow Rachel down, down, down into the ocean deep, where Elfangor touched his arm and _knew_ and didn’t tell him even in his last moments.

Where Rachel touched his arm and invited him to dance.

 _Twenty five years_ was too long, anyway.

**Rachel** no longer has a body. She is a consciousness that lays dormant in the Ellimist’s arms, a child he rocks to sleep. Her body has been buried, the leveya happening only hours after her death, shared with her cousin who’s bones she broke between her teeth. Crayak knocks on the dark matter that makes him up angrily, _give her to me give her to m_ -

She feels no pain when he wakes her again, long after her broken body has decomposed - become soil and nutrients for the rest of the earth.

He lets her rewind events like a video, and for so long - nearly an eternity - she watches Ax’s face split open, watches the ship ( _her_ namesake) veer forward, sees - sees -

 _You’re not the only one who defined herself by battle. By the guts she’s spilled, by ten thousand yeerks dropped into empty space, by the constant constant internal battle of killing a family member. By the blood she tasted and the bones she broke and the role forced upon her and the loss, the constant reminder of loss._ Crayak knocks on the dark matter that holds her, and a thousand fires and a thousand wars and a thousand evils explode outside their contained space.

<So, is that just how it is?

Someone breaks so others don’t?>

He fashions her a body made of dark matter, where Crayak’s hands had hit and dented. _How does it feel?_ Like being alive, like being flayed alive, a place where war took place. Horrible. _Horrible_.

_I hope for a universe where it doesn’t._

**Author's Note:**

> Sir, the popular "Rachel becomes the Ellimist's partner against Crayak" headcanon is my emotional support headcanon.


End file.
